This article in itself has had a
varied history. It began as a paper on Waverider
applications, based on ASTRA's "Man and the Planets"
discussion project, which I gave at the L5 Society
Conference in London in 1977. It wasn't published, and in
1982 the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society
published an updated version, deleting all references to
ASTRA in accordance with the BIS bye-laws. We did a complete
version for our own members in Spacereport. A very much
revised version appeared again in Spacereport in 1988, after
our Waverider conference, and still another in Asgard in
1990 after NASA's. Parts of it appeared again in 'Flight in
Non-Terrestrial Atmospheres, or the Hang-Glider's Guide to
the Galaxy', which Gordon Ross and I co-authored for the
January 1993 issue of Analog, and ASTRA published a longer
version in Asgard. We still have the masters of the 1988,
1990 and 1992 articles, and we can supply a set of copies
for £5.

The Waverider reentry vehicle was
devised by Prof.
Terence Nonweiler of Queen's
College, Belfast, and was intended to be the manned
spacecraft in the British space programme based on the Blue
Streak missile. The programme was cancelled by the Macmillan
government, but work on Waverider continued at the Royal
Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough - mainly with a view to
establishing Waverider's potential as a Mach 6 airliner.
During this period (1960 - 65) at least one Waverider was
tested at the Woomera Rocket Range, mounted on the nose of
an air-launched Blue Steel missile. There are rumours that
free-flight tests were also conducted at this time, but we
have not been able to confirm this. The nearest thing to it
seems to have been tests of X and Y-winged projectiles - in
effect, four or three Waveriders mounted back-to-back - at
NASA's Ames Research Center.

At the same time Prof.
Nonweiler became Professor of
Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics at Glasgow University, and
on March 30 1962 he spoke on 'The Future in Space' to the
Scottish Branch of the British Interplanetary Society, in
the University Observatory. As it happens, this was the
first meeting of the society which I ever attended. I don't
recall any mention of Waverider's as such, though he did
speak about upper atmosphere densities and reentry problems.
However, he became a member of the society, and remained one
when the decision was taken the following year to turn it
into an independent Scottish society called ASTRA
(originally the Association in Scotland for Technology and
Research in Astronautics, later to Research into
Astronautics' at the insistence of the Companies
Office).

Nonweiler's classic paper 'Delta
Wings of Shapes Amenable to Exact Shock-Wave Theory' was
received by the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society in
September 1962, and earned him that society's Gold Medal,
but it was two to three years later before the concept
briefly came into the public eye, due to the Mach 6 airliner
work and the prospect of reaching Australia in 90 minutes.
Newspaper articles lead to an appearance on an extremely
contrived Scottish Television programme, in which news
figures of the day were supposedly discovered in a
restaurant: Professor and Mrs. Nonweiler just happened to
have brought a Waverider model with them to dinner. Sandy
Glover (my predecessor as President of ASTRA) and I both saw
the programme, and as we were students of Glasgow University
at the time we were able to buttonhole Professor Nonweiler
and ask him various questions, including the fairly obvious
geometrical problems of launching it and landing it as an
airliner. We were disappointed to learn that on that level
Waverider was still a purely theoretical concept, which
didn't yet even include control surfaces.

In 1967 Professor
Nonweiler took part in an
ASTRA discussion project which led to my book "Man and the
Stars" (Souvenir Press, 1974). His brief was to consider the
problems of interstellar travel and navigation, but we went
on to discuss the problems of landing on an Earth like world
and in consequence the book included a description of the
Waverider. Professor Nonweiler was strongly advocating
winged space vehicles for delivery to planetary surfaces,
and for landing in unknown terrain, he insisted on 'time to
enquire' over the landing site - best attained with a
low-wing-loading glider such as the Waverider. In this and
in later meetings, he dismissed arguments that more
sophisticated systems than wings would in time become
available: wherever you have a planet with an atmosphere, a
wing, which makes use of the properties of that atmosphere,
is more elegant than something which wastes energy staying
aloft by other means.

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